


A Thousand Panes of Glass

by dashakay



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-18 17:01:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4713635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashakay/pseuds/dashakay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another impossible miracle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All my thanks to icedteainthebag, leiascully, and scienceandmysticism for betaing various parts.
> 
> And my love to my squad, who never let me give up.

The first time it happens, Scully is standing at the nursing desk, describing Michaela Baxter’s new medication schedule to Alice, her favorite pediatrics nurse. “I believe it will be more effective if—” she says and then the wave washes over her. Silver spots dance in her vision and her knees buckle under her. She grasps at the Formica top of the desk for support, willing herself not to fall. 

Alice cocks her head. “Dr. Scully? Are you all right?” Alice’s voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a deep well. 

She takes a deep breath and blinks rapidly. “I think so,” she says. “I just felt a little faint for a minute.”

“Have you eaten anything lately?” It’s two in the afternoon. 

The floor feels like it’s slowly sinking under her, buckling under her well-worn clogs. “I—I don’t know.” She vaguely remembers her rushed morning and choosing straightening her hair over making breakfast. 

Alice takes her by the arm. “Let’s go to the call room. You need to sit down for a minute.” 

In the institutional quiet of the call room, she sits on the bottom bunk and attempts to put her head between her knees, but she’s not as flexible as she used to be. She inhales through her nose and out her mouth. Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. 

The door opens and she looks up to see Alice, holding a bottle of water and something packaged in shiny foil. “Dr. Scully, I brought you some water and an energy bar,” she says, holding out them out like an offering. 

It’s still strange to be called Dr. Scully again even though she’s in her second year of residency. For so long she was mostly Agent Scully. 

“Thank you, Alice.” 

Alice shakes her head of corkscrew brown curls and frowns. “You need to take better care of yourself. I’m guessing no breakfast and no lunch, either. Eat, rest up a minute and you’ll feel good as new.” 

She nods and unwraps the energy bar. Caramel-cashew, a favorite flavor. She takes a deep bite, enjoying the mingling of savory and sweet on her tongue. 

Stress, overwork, lack of sleep, definite lack of food and hydration. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. 

She’s back on the floor in five minutes. 

*

The second time is on Tuesday morning, her only day off that week. She wakes earlier than she’d ideally like, overtaken by an overwhelming need to pee. Peeling Mulder’s sleep-heavy arm off her chest, she sits up and swings her legs over the edge of the bed, yawning. 

When she stands up, she feels it again, that wave of sickening lightheadedness, the wood floor receding and bending beneath her. She stumbles and trips over one of the boxes of books they still haven’t gotten around to unpacking. “Shit!” she mutters as she attempts to steady herself. 

She hears Mulder mumble, “You okay, Scully?” 

“Tripped on that damn box,” she manages to say, the air around her shimmering a pale silver. She sits back down on the edge of the bed. 

He sits up and she feels his morning stubble brush against her bare shoulder. “Are you okay?” Mulder says, his voice raspy with sleep. 

She takes a deep breath and the air seems to clear. “I’m fine,” she says. 

“Then come back to bed,” he says, hot lips pressing into her neck. 

“In a minute.” She stands on wobbly colt legs, testing the level of gravity in the bedroom’s atmosphere. Another deep breath and she feels ready to traverse the twelve steps to the bathroom. 

In the bathroom, she looks at herself in the mirror. Her hair is a disheveled mess, as usual first thing in the morning, and she seems a bit pale, but nothing seems out of the ordinary. It was merely a simple drop in her systolic blood pressure. Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, she thinks. Perhaps the onset of  Meniere's disease? Hypoglycemia or anemia? 

Scully sits down on the toilet, running the medical checklist through her mind over and over. 

She doesn’t think of Bellefleur. Not once. 

* 

The third time she’s well rested, well fed, not terribly caffeinated. She’s in the hospital’s parking garage near midnight, trying to find her car keys in her handbag, ready to go home after a long but not extraordinarily stressful shift. 

This time she finds herself sitting on the cement floor, her head lolling against the door of her car. She tries to stand up at first, worried someone will see her, maybe even someone she knows, but her legs aren’t ready yet. 

The only other time in her life she felt like this was— 

No. Not possible. 

She remembers that night in Oregon, recalls standing in the motel bathroom, squeezing blue toothpaste on the brush when the sickening faint sensation began to creep up her spine to her head. And how she blindly found her way to Mulder’s room, stumbling onto his bed, still fully dressed. How he held her and told her, in the gentlest voice possible, to go home. 

What if? 

It seems impossible. 

Rule out the improbable, she orders herself, slowly standing. 

As soon as her head clears, she starts the car, drives out of the garage and goes in search of a twenty-four-hour drugstore.


	2. Chapter 2

Scully sits on the front steps of their house, watching the rising sun create streaks of ochre and gold in the still-dark sky. 

Her right hand grips a Ziploc bag. Inside the bag is a piece of white plastic not much longer than a Popsicle stick. 

She’s trying to think, to logically sort through the meaning of that piece of plastic but her brain seems to be emitting a kind of white noise—a low, buzzing hum that prevents any sort of conscious thought. Instead, she watches two plump squirrels, one gray and the other albino white, chase each other through the grass. It’s going to be a gorgeous, but blazingly hot, September day. The Virginia humidity is already curling the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck. 

She hears the front door open and the sound of his footsteps. She turns her head to see Mulder, morning-rumpled in his gray VCU basketball shirt and boxers. He touches her shoulder. “What are you doing up so early?” he says. “You’re off today.” 

It feels like there’s a hummingbird fluttering in her chest. “I’m thinking,” she says. The gray squirrel runs down the trunk of the big oak tree and makes a mad dash in the direction of the road. 

Mulder sits down next to her on the steps, his cranky left kneecap making a popping sound. She winces at the sound. He probably needs surgery but is too stubborn to see an orthopedist. 

His voice is soft. “What are you thinking about?” 

She hands him the bag. He takes it carefully in his long fingers and holds it at a distance from his face. Mulder needs glasses for reading nowadays and so does she. 

Scully can hear his long, soft exhale and then nothing at all for several agonizing seconds. He turns his face to hers, his eyes dark gray in the half-light. “Is this good news or bad news?” 

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.” She doesn’t, that’s the thing. It’s as if her brain refuses to process the news. 

They’d discussed this very topic in their early days on the run. One night in a small-town Arkansas motel, she’d sat on the bed and told him that she didn’t want to have another child, if such a thing were even possible. Mulder had agreed with her. They were fugitives from the law then and running from some even scarier enemies. It wouldn’t be fair to bring another innocent life into such an equation. 

Scully never gave it a second thought, even after everything changed and they were able live more or less out in the open. 

Mulder takes her hand and squeezes it. “How did this even happen?” 

Her laugh is mirthless. “I think you _know_ how it happened.” 

She still doesn’t quite know what brought her reproductive system back to life. Was it the artifact in Côte d'Ivoire? God help her, could it have been the strange night she passed with the Smoking Man? Something even worse? Even though they’ve been in search of the truth for so long, she’s not sure she wants to find out this truth in particular. 

“But we were careful,” he says. 

“Apparently not careful enough,” she snaps. Hormonal birth control made her nauseated all the time. The diaphragm never seemed to fit quite right, despite her trying three different sizes. Her uterus managed to expel two models of copper IUDs. So condoms it was, despite their advanced ages. Condoms made her feel like a teenager in the back seat after the homecoming game but they got the job done. Or so she thought. 

“I want to be happy about this,” Mulder whispers, leaning in close enough that she can smell the minty toothpaste on his breath. “But I can’t be happy if you’re not.” 

“I don’t know how to feel.” Scully searches her brain for an appropriate emotion but comes up empty. She feels as numb as if she’d been given intravenous Novocain. 

Feel _something_ , she orders herself and for a brief, sickening instant she remembers kissing William’s downy head for the last time, remembers inhaling his sweet, milky scent. Her stomach contracts into a tight knot. 

“It’s just—I don’t know if I can—” she stammers. Her next image is Emily, so small in the hospital bed. “I don’t think I would survive losing another one.” 

Mulder squeezes her hand again. “Scully,” he says, his voice so soft she has to strain to hear him. “I know. I’m sorry.” 

She feels tears rolling down her cheeks and wipes them with the back of her hand. “I don’t believe in fate, not really, but…what if?” 

Miscarriage, Down syndrome, other genetic disorders, advanced maternal age complications, preeclampsia, preterm birth, stillbirth, birth injury, SIDS, household accidents, car crashes, intergalactic conspiracies, Mulder leaving again, Mulder dying again—they all flash through her mind at lightning speed, a terrible litany of everything that could possibly happen. 

“I refuse to believe that,” Mulder says, his voice firm. He kisses the top of her head. “I can’t believe that fate would be so cruel to you.” 

She can. 

Turning the bag over and over again in his hands, he says, “Maybe this is a chance to set things right.” 

“I don’t think it can ever be set right.”  William is now three years old, is somewhere out there and she’ll never see him again. 

“That might not have been the right choice of words. Maybe it’s better to think of it as a new beginning.” 

Scully turns her head to look at him, that unusual and beautiful face of his she’s loved for so long. “I want to believe,” she says. 

Mulder touches his warm forehead to hers. “What if I do all the believing as usual? At least until you’re ready to believe, too.” 

She wonders if she’ll ever believe. Her capacity for optimism has been severely crippled over the years. 

Scully thinks of something Father McCue once said during Mass when she was pregnant with William. “Miracles are mysterious,” the priest had said from the altar. “We may not know why God brings them some times and not others. We can only accept, with open hearts, the Lord’s plan for us.” 

“Another miracle,” she says, more to herself than to Mulder. If God truly has a plan for her, for _them_ , it’s a particularly mysterious and complicated one. “Even though I wasn’t asking for one this time.” She feels her lips, almost against her will, curling into a smile. 

“It’ll be all right. I know it. I believe,” Mulder says. 

Scully leans against his shoulder, watching the two squirrels, still romping through the grass with boundless energy. 

Together, they sit on the steps until the sun finally rises above the tree line. 

“Come on,” Mulder says, rising. He holds his hand out to her. “Everything always seems possible after breakfast.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Too many squirrels?


	3. Chapter 3

Dr. Jo Mendoza, glasses perched on the end of her nose, reads through Scully’s medical history. Scully sits at the edge of the exam table, clad only in a stiff paper exam gown. Exam gowns remind her of sickness, of cancer, of blood draws and PET scans. They remind her of William—the mingled taste of mourning and hope. 

Her mouth is dry with nerves. She takes a sip from a paper cone of water but it doesn’t help much. Scully knows what’s coming and her heart pounds in her chest as she waits for it. 

She knows Jo fairly well. They ended up on the same NARAL benefit bowling team last year and struck up a friendly acquaintance, mostly over coffee in the hospital cafeteria. Jo is about Scully’s age, with a rat-tat-tat New York accent and a thick, black braid hanging down her back. Scully chose her after learning that Jo specialized in advanced maternal age patients and was known for a calming bedside manner. Calming is good. 

Jo looks up, brown eyes blinking. “It says here you had a son in May 2001…” Scully is sure that Jo is wondering why she’s never mentioned her child. 

Scully gulps. She’s rehearsed what to say next but in this panicked moment, she completely forgets her plan. Wearing her paper gown, she feels exposed, as if a harsh light is suddenly shining on her. For a second she wishes she’d gone to a doctor who didn’t know her at all, someone she could lie to about her adorable four-year-old son and his preschool antics. 

“I  _had_  a son,” she says, fingers clutching the exam table. Her face feels unnaturally hot. “But due to…due to a difficult and harrowing situation at the time, I felt it was in his…his best interest…to place him for adoption.” There. She said it. Deep breath. 

Something flickers across Jo’s face. Pity, Scully decides. “And has that situation resolved since then?” Jo’s voice is soft. 

Scully nods. She would never be able to explain it to Jo. About how the situation will never resolve, not with shadowy men still out there, with 2012 looming on the horizon. 

“Do you have a good support system now?” 

Her support system is currently sitting in the waiting room, probably reading one of the copies of  _Sports Illustrated_  provided for bored fathers-to-be. “I do,” she says. This much is true. 

“Good,” says Jo, her voice brisk and professional once more. “So, your previous birth, it was a normal vaginal birth?” 

Scully almost wants to laugh. It was normal only if you consider giving birth in an abandoned town attended by a whale-song-singing FBI agent midwife and surrounded by super soldiers to be normal. “Yes,” she replies. 

“And no complications?” 

She shakes her head. The complications have been many and ongoing, but they’re not medical in nature. 

“Great!” Jo sets down the clipboard. “Let’s do another urine test to be sure and then a quick exam.”

* 

Mulder joins them after another positive pregnancy test, a blood draw, and pelvic exam. He seems like a specimen of tall, bumbling masculinity in this room devoted to impending motherhood. 

Scully never knows how to refer to Mulder around other people. Boyfriend sounds too high school when they’re both past forty. Lover makes him sound like something from a bad French art house film. Husband is probably the closest to describing all he is to her, but legally it’s not true and probably never will be.  She decides to go with the old standard. “Dr. Mendoza, this is my partner, Fox Mulder.” 

He smiles, a little sheepishly. “Nice to meet you,” he says. He’s exchanged his usual uniform of sweatshirt and jeans for a yuppie pair of khakis and a blue button-down shirt. Shades of the Falls of Arcadia, she thinks. 

“Nice to meet you, too. Sorry that I can’t shake but I’m scrubbed,” Jo says. “Okay, Dana, lie back. Fox, we’re going to do a transvaginal ultrasound to determine the date.” 

Scully obediently lies back on the table, her knees bent. 

“Unless you’re really curious, you can stay up there by Dana’s head,” says the doctor. 

Scully shoots Mulder a look. “Don’t say that to him. He’s eternally curious.” It’s not like Mulder hasn’t seen her genitalia a thousand times before but in this context she’d rather keep some things a mystery. 

“A transvaginal ultrasound gives us a better view than a transabdominal one this early in pregnancy,” Jo explains to Mulder, who nods in response as if he’s listening to the deepest secrets of life, the universe, and the existence of extraterrestrials. 

Something flares in Scully’s chest, something warm. The first time she went through all this, she was alone. Mulder was somewhere lost in space and she was all by herself in a cold exam room, waiting to see an image of her baby. I’m not alone this time, she thinks. 

As if reading her mind, Mulder takes her hand and squeezes it. 

She flinches as Jo inserts the ultrasound probe. 

“I’m not hurting you, am I?” Jo asks. 

“No,” she says. Out of the corner of the eye she can see Mulder smirking just a little and she digs her fingernails into his palm as retribution. 

And there it is, on the monitor. A tiny blob of matter that is the comingling of her genes and Mulder’s. For a minute she forgets to breathe. 

Mulder’s fingers tighten around her own. “There it is,” he says in a voice usually reserved for alien crash sites. 

He missed all this the first time around, she thinks, tears pricking her eyes. 

“Yes, that’s your baby. Judging by the sac size and the crown-to-rump length, it’s approximately seven weeks old,” Jo says. 

“Oh,” she breathes. She stares at the monitor, at the quivering life that is their child. 

“Is it…is it normal?” Mulder asks, still clutching her hand like a life raft. 

“No abnormalities can be seen right now but remember that it’s very early in the pregnancy. We can discuss prenatal testing after this,” says Jo. 

She can’t, won’t, think about fetal abnormalities right now. That’s for later, for dreams that will wake her in the smallest hours of the morning in a cold sweat of dread. 

“But, look right here,” Jo says in a reassuring tone. “We can see the baby’s heartbeat. A strong heartbeat—about 145 beats per minute. That’s a good sign.” 

“Oh,” she says again, words having completely fled. She remembers seeing William’s heartbeat for the first time and how it filled her with the same awe at the magic of human reproduction. 

“Our baby,” Mulder says, so quietly she almost can’t hear him. 

“Ours,” she whispers. Perhaps this  _is_  their chance to start over, to get it somewhat right. 

For a long minute they don’t move, don’t speak, while they watch the baby’s heart flutter on the monitor.


	4. Chapter 4

The drive home from the hospital at dusk is quiet, Mulder piloting the car northwest on 64. Scully rests her head on the passenger window and closes her eyes. She listens to the spatter of light September rain and the swish-swish of the windshield wipers. Mulder switches on the radio and she hears the hosts of All Things Considered chat about the news of the day in soft, smug tones.

This reminds her of car trips with her family, squished between Bill and Melissa in the back seat of the Buick, driving halfway across the country to visit her grandparents in Iowa. She remembers driving at night, everyone half-asleep but her father, who sat in the driver’s seat at rigid Navy attention, steering their boat through dark waters.

She feels Mulder’s hand squeeze her upper arm and she smiles.

Scully wonders how many thousands of miles they traveled together in rental cars while in the Bureau. They drove through every state in the nation but Hawaii. She remembers nights like this when Mulder drove to yet another small town in the heartland of America and she attempted to rest for a few minutes, surreptitiously kicking off her heels, which constantly pinched her toes. Mulder gave up sunflower seeds last year on the advice of his personal, live-in doctor, who had concerns about the sodium content of his favorite snack. Now she misses the familiar sound of the seeds cracking between his teeth.

Tonight she wishes they could drive forever. Stay in this car and never stop, safe and warm inside, where nothing can hurt them. Ironic. In her later years in Bureau, she so often longed to stop the car. Get out of the car, have a house, a life, a normal career that didn’t involve abductions, bullets, or shadowy men whispering conspiracies in Mulder’s ear. After more than a year on the run, they finally got out of the metaphorical car and now she just wants to drive, north on 95, and then west to points as yet unknown, unexplored.

*

After dinner, Scully leaves Mulder to do the dishes and she climbs the creaking wood stairs to the bathroom to take a shower. She smells medical, like Prodine surgical scrub, disinfectant floor cleaner, and the lubricant Jo used for the ultrasound. She doesn’t smell like herself. She’s always spent a fortune on shower gels and shampoos to wash the smell of death and illness off her skin. The scent of the month is yuzu, fresh and bright-smelling.

She flops on the bed in her bathrobe after the shower, lying spread-eagled and staring at the water stains on the ceiling. They’ll need to replace the roof next spring. The rain is heavier now, droplets landing on the windowpanes with fat plops. She’s exhausted but it feels too early to go to bed.

The stairs creak with Mulder’s distinctive tread. He pokes his head in the room. “BSG starts in five minutes. Consider yourself warned.”

She nods absently and focuses on the stain that looks like the old Soviet hammer and sickle.

Mulder walks to the foot of the bed. “Come on. Do you really want to miss the return of the Pegasus?”

“Just give me a minute,” she says.

He lands on the bed with a thud that makes her worry about the wood frame, an antique they found at a shop in Charlottesville in June.

“You okay, Scully?”

She nods. “May 7th,” she says.

“The revised date of colonization?”

She shakes her head. “The baby’s due date. You weren’t there when Jo calculated it.”

He’s silent for a moment and she waits for realization to dawn on him. “Oh,” he finally says. “May.”

William’s birthday is May 22nd.

Scully tries to make a joke. “I seem to be quite fertile in the month of August. Good to know for future reference.”

Mulder kisses her temple. “Is that going to make it harder for you?”

She tries to shrug but it’s hard when lying down. “I don’t know. Maybe? Probably?” She sighs. “I worry that everything about this is going to be hard.”

He rolls onto his side. She can feel his warm breath on her cheek. “It doesn’t have to be,” he says.

“Easy for you to say.” He wasn’t there. Mulder wasn’t there the day she kissed her son for the last time. Mulder was miles away that night, when she collapsed on her bed and was sure she’d never get up again.

“I know.” He sighs.

She rolls onto her side. “It’s just…it’s just I feel like this is crazy. We’re old, Mulder. I’m forty-two and you’re forty-six. If colonization doesn’t kill us all in seven years, I’ll be sixty when this child graduates from high school. And you—with your bad knee I worry you won’t even be able to carry her. Or him.”

He tucks a loose strand of her hair behind her ear, a familiar gesture that usually warms her to the core. “I could always get a robot exoskeleton,” he says.

Mulder has to turn everything into a joke, she thinks. She rolls her eyes. “Be serious for a minute, Mulder. Have you stopped to consider all of these issues?”

“Of course I have. This is all I've thought about the past few days. Give me some credit, okay?” He rolls his eyes back at her.

“Fair enough.”

“Look, if this is too hard for you, Scully, you don’t have to go through with it.” His voice is nearly as flat and devoid of emotion as she’s ever heard it.

Scully nods. She’s aware she has that choice and she’s grateful for it, but she could never choose it for herself, except in a life or death situation. Like it or not, this baby is a miracle and it would be profane to turn her back on a miracle.

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I couldn’t.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he says. “I can feel it in my bones.”

She chuckles. “When did you become Mr. Optimism?”

He kisses her on the tip of her nose. “Look, I want to be supportive. I plan to be supportive. But don’t make me be the sane, stable one for all nine months. I don’t know if I can fake it that long.”

“Thirty-three weeks,” she says, correcting him. “You can’t rein in in for thirty-three weeks?”

“I can try,” he says. “But you know me.”

A tear rolls down her cheek. “Just don’t go away again,” she whispers. “I can’t do this alone.”

“Never,” he says, inching closer to her. “Never.”

She kisses him, long and slow, as if her kisses will bind him to her for eternity. He groans when her tongue enters his mouth and her fingers begin to unbutton his shirt. Pressing her body against his, she feels him harden beneath the khakis he'd worn to the OB appointment to look like a respectable father-to-be.

Mulder’s skin is hot like sunburn. She wiggles out of her bathrobe so she can slide her chest against his, smooth and soft against coarse and hairy.

“That’s nice,” he says, his voice husky.

“Get those pants off,” she orders and watches in amusement as he struggles to remove them while lying down. Mulder will never be lauded for his efficiency, she thinks. He tosses the trousers across the room and they land on top of the dresser, nearly knocking over a framed photo of her parents on their wedding day.

His hand delves between her legs, where she’s already wet for him, so ready. They haven’t made love since she found out she was pregnant several days ago. It’s been too long. She whimpers a bit as he maddeningly circles her clitoris without actually touching her.

“Uh, Scully?”

Words are suddenly hard to formulate. “Mulder?”

“So…if we do this…are we going to hurt the baby?”

She has to choke back laughter. How ignorant men are. “No, we won’t. We had sex dozens of times the last time. We just didn’t know I was pregnant.”

“You’re sure?”

They didn’t make love after he returned from the dead, when she was huge and lumbering. He was too traumatized from his experience, their relationship too tenuous, to risk such a thing. They slept in the same bed a few times, slept with his hand protectively resting on her belly, she remembers.

“It’s fine, Mulder. I’m a doctor. I officially know these things.”

He crawls backwards to the foot of the bed and spreads her apart with his fingers. She feels his tongue do the same frustrating thing his fingers just did—almost, but not quite there. Go there, she silently orders him. Her nerves feel like they’ve doubled, maybe tripled. Increased blood flow to the pubic area, her doctor voice informs her. She tells the doctor to shut the hell up as Mulder finally touches her clitoris with his tongue, brushing it so slowly with the tip she thinks she might scream. She props herself on her elbows and grabs his head to control the pace, to urge him to go faster like that, yes, just like that.

Two of his long fingers drive into her, again and again until she’s thrashing her damp head against the pillows. Never stop, she thinks, just do this forever and my life will be a good one. And then she hears herself cry out as her orgasm takes over her entire body, wave after wave after wave until it’s nothing but tiny ripples in the current.

He lifts his head from between her legs and cockily grins. Mulder has always been inordinately proud of his ability to make her come, ever since she confessed to him that it was a difficult achievement with past partners.

“That was nice,” she sighs.

“Nice? Come on, Scully. I deserve a trophy for that.”

She sits up and crooks her finger at him. “Get up here,” she says.

He obediently moves up the bed and kisses her. She tastes herself on his lips and finds it, as always, strangely exciting. “Let me do the hard work,” she whispers.

“Gladly,” he says and he sits up against the headboard.

Her fingers find him hard. Mulder is a medical miracle, she thinks. Thank goodness for all the running and the weight lifting.

“We don’t have to use condoms anymore,” she reminds him and his eyes widen.

It feels so good to straddle him, to guide him in and feel the bare length of him fill her. His hands grip her hips as she begins to move his cock in an out of her depths. She watches his eyes close and then open again. It reminds her of the first time they made love, four days after the the new year began, on his old leather couch. If she closes her eyes, she can see the stunned sweetness on his face on that very first night.

Harder and faster now. She can feel sweat gathering at the nape of her neck and her lower back. Mulder’s fingers find her clit again and she jerks at the electric sensation. It almost hurts but it doesn’t. She can’t take her eyes off his face, how he bites his lips a little and his eyes, dark gray in the dim room, appear to lose focus.

Now she feels it again, this time softer, gentler, like the rain outside the windows. She gasps and hears Mulder groaning his nonsense syllables, feels him lifting from the bed to meet her halfway. “Oh, Scully,” he manages to say and then he’s lost, too.

For a long time they’re still as marble statues, frozen in their pleasure. And then she collapses on his damp chest. “Oh God,” she sighs.

A laugh rumbles from his throat. “God ain’t got nothin’ to do with it, Scully.”

“That’s what you think, Mulder.”

He pulls her close and kisses the top of her head. “I said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s going to be okay.”

For one brief, shining moment, she actually believes him.


End file.
